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Mauss Redux: From Warfare's Human Toll to L'hommetotalChris Garces, Alexander Jones

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp.279-309 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for EthnographicResearchDOI: 10.1353/anq.0.0046

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SOCIAL THOUGHT & COMMENTARY

Mauss Redux: From Warfare’sHuman Toll to L’homme total 1

Chris GarcesSarah Lawrence College

Alexander JonesSarah Lawrence College

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 279–310, ISSN 0003-549. © 2009 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

AbstractAfter his 1919 demobilization, yet before writing The Gift (1925), Marcel Maussdeveloped his concept of the “total human being” (l’homme total) as amethodological spur in works such as “L’expression obligatoire des sentiments”(1921). This translation and introduction to “The obligatory expression of feel-ings” highlights Mauss’s post-war transition to psycho-physiological researchand the concept of totality. Here, Mauss considers Australian “greeting bytears” as a synchronized performance of mind, body, and soul. We argue thatMauss’s post-war concerns had crystallized around the omnipresent threat ofloss-of-humanity and his war-survivor’s scepticism toward absolute concep-tions of individual and collective sovereignty. [Keywords: Marcel Mauss,Comparative Ethnology, Gift Exchange, Sovereignty, War, Tears, The Body]

Mauss Redux: From Warfare’s Human Toll to L’homme total

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Describing his work in a 1934 interview with an American sociologist,Marcel Mauss noted: “My major interest is not to set up some broad gen-

eral theoretical scheme that covers the whole field (an impossible task!), butonly to show something of the dimensions of the field, of which so far, wehave only touched the edges…Having worked in this way, my theories arescattered and unsystematic” (Mauss and Eubank 1989:165).

Despite the legendary breadth of his learning, Mauss would never com-plete a large and formally structured monograph—or his dissertation—during his lifetime. Although he dedicated much of his academic career toediting colleagues’ works, most notably after World War I had decimatedthe cadre of Durkheimian sociologists, Mauss independently gained widerenown for provocative essays, commentaries, and book reviews in Frenchscientific journals, socialist circulars, and newspapers. His contemporarieswould have viewed his 1934 self-assessment, avant la lettre, as all-too-puckishly true to form: Mauss used his considerable erudition to reinter-pret the growing field of comparative ethnology and to propose new ques-tions, preferring tentative suggestions and tantalizing connections oversociological conclusions. This approach to scholarship comes through withremarkable clarity in “The obligatory expression of feelings.” His essay’svery structure gave a powerful incitement to theoretical and methodolog-ical integration between the fields of sociology and psychology. But it alsoheralded a major shift in the subject of comparative ethnology.

Mauss published “The Obligatory Expression of Feelings” in 1921 in theJournal de psychologie. His essay’s call for new topics for collaborativework reflected the circumstances in which it was produced: the end of asix-year hiatus in his work caused by the First World War.2 Several ofMauss’s dearest academic colleagues, including his close friend RobertHertz, had died in combat. Many of his students also lost their lives on theEuropean battlefronts. Emile Durkheim—Mauss’s uncle, academic men-tor, and fierce intellectual collaborator—was disconsolate after his onlyson’s death and likewise died before the armistice. Facing the disorderinto which the Année school had been cast by European historical events,3

and feeling duty-bound to defend and consolidate its considerable lega-cy, Mauss attempted a curious rapprochement between sociology and psy-chology immediately upon re-entry into French academic life. Mauss’shomecoming should have led him to explore questions that sociologistsabandoned with the onset of international hostilities, or to resume hisprograms of study on prayer, social morphology, and the “archaic cate-

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CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

gories” of human thought. The potential for a scientific reassessment ofthe Année sociologique’s “previous results” had filled him with hope dur-ing his military service (cf. Fournier 2005:218). But the human toll ofmechanized warfare—even one’s deliverance from military command—often necessitates a period of self-questioning introspection. For Maussand other soldier-intellectuals, the return to a peacetime routine was shotthrough with a hard-to-articulate impulse to work through one’s personallosses (cf. Hollier 1997). At this juncture of his academic and civil re-emer-gence, in any case, Mauss took it upon himself to analyze the phenome-non of “greeting by tears” in Australian funerary cults and their parallelsin Polynesian, North American, and South American case studies.

The decision to examine what ethnological literatures had to say abouttears was neither accidental nor entirely academic. Mauss’s return to aca-demic life starts with a project on death and mourning in aboriginal soci-eties, a course of study deeply informed by his personal exposure tomechanized warfare. Over a span of six years, entire generations of menhad been decimated to advance the interests of nation and homeland, amilitary stalemate and legacy of complicit brutalization that plungedEuropean countries into a dangerous post-war environment of recrimina-tions and counter-accusations over the War-to-End-All-War’s moral andgeopolitical worthlessness. Mourning for those who never returned fromthe battlefields—i.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could notbe assimilated within the logic of national sacrifice—quickly assumed aspectral quality of unresolved political significance. “The obligatoryexpression of feelings” thus symptomatically draws attention to “ourmuch missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim” and to these fallen com-patriots’ studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his col-leagues’ ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertz’s andDurkheim’s arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segmentsof so-called “archaic societies,” occupied a mediating role between theliving and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of “greeting by tears”not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record. Mauss’sessay claims to have located a non-Western practice that allows cosmolog-ical imbalances of death and cycles of malevolent accusations to be fullyresolved. Could ethnologically-informed models of conflict resolutionhelp to reduce the appeal of international belligerence? Might reconcilia-tion with the dead perhaps curtail a second lapse into open warfare?Moreover, should the European calamity motivate scholars to question


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the necessary relationship between masculinity and politics-as-usual?Mauss did not explicitly address these questions during the 1920s. But heconsistently drew upon lessons gained from wartime in seeking new com-parative and self-critical methodologies as he resumed ethnological stud-ies with an eye to dangerous political undercurrents.

In what follows, we provide a social and historical background forMauss’s unheralded essay on “greeting by tears.” We interpret the web ofhis personal, disciplinary, and political entanglements that moved him toquestion the boundaries of ethnology and to challenge his colleagues onthe psycho-physiological significance of crying in a period marked bydeath, mourning, and loss. This critical introduction is followed by a fulltranslation of “L’expression obligatoire des sentiments.” We did not origi-nally set out to re-examine the influence of World War I on Mauss’s eth-nological thinking—a question normally handled in the fields of Frenchcomparative literature and European intellectual history. Over time,however, the daily task of revisiting, translating, and critically situating“The obligatory expression of feelings” has led us to view the documentas an essay that subtly traces Mauss’s intellectual displacement from hispre-war ethnological commitments and migration toward his under-standing of the gift.

From today’s perspective, Mauss’s inter-war writings provide a timelymodel for anthropological critique in the wake of international bellicosi-ty and looming political economic crises. His essays from 1920-25 defend-ed what might be called an epistemological standpoint of multidiscipli-nary inductivism, a radical challenge that he described in various waysacross his formal and occasional writings. By the early 1920s, Mauss hadgained a reputation for revalorizing non-Western societies’ demonized rit-uals and practices, generating a sense of empirical intrigue among his col-leagues and inspiring a younger generation to problematize the logic ofsacrifice and collective life in ethnographic contexts.4 We claim thatMauss’s theory of the gift, along with its remarkable intellectualresilience, is largely attributable to the multidisciplinary inductivism hedeveloped in “The obligatory expression of feelings” and other worksfrom the early 1920s. Mauss continually recalibrated his methodologicalstance in response to the political and economic developments of his age;we do not find it surprising that anthropologists, writing in the after-shocks of the bloody 20th century, would continue to invest his majorpost-war texts with contemporary significance nearly a century after they

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were written. Today’s ethnographers still have much to gain from reval-orizing his ethnological scepticism, perhaps now more than ever, asanthropologists turn to philosophically derived principles such as sover-eignty, ethics, and the body, in order to illuminate assemblages of powerin a world of incontrovertible global transformations.

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After WWI, Mauss argued that human existence included a variety of“miscellaneous facts” that could not be resolved within Durkheimian soci-ology proper, including the “spiritual force” of the collective, the signifi-cance of corporal technologies, and the socially conditioned nature ofinterpersonal obligations. In his 1925 Essai sur le don, Mauss notablyargued that after having

“divided things up too much, and abstracted from them, the sociol-ogists must strive to reconstitute the whole. By doing so they willdiscover rewarding facts. They will also find a way to satisfy the psy-chologists. The latter are strongly aware of their privileged position;the psychopathologists, in particular, are certain that they can studythe concrete. All these study or should observe, the behaviour oftotal beings, not divided according to their faculties. We must imi-tate them. The study of the concrete, which is the study of complete-ness, is possible, and more captivating, more explanatory still insociology. (Mauss 1990[1925]: 80)

This statement offers his most generalized account of the phenomenonof totality. But Mauss’s sociological entreaty to consider the whole personwas also described in a number of his more speculative and politically ori-ented essays. These occasional works dealt primarily with 1920s geopolit-ical problems, the standard-normative analysis of which typicallybetrayed subtle forms of ethnocentrism, including European and Russiannationalism, the impress of technology upon racialized bodies, the social-ist cooperative movement, and “thanatomania” (i.e. the violent negationof the life instinct by the social instinct). “L’expression obligatoire des sen-timents,” an early endeavour in this line of inquiry, considered the inter-nationally problematic role of “ feelings” in mourning for dead lovedones. The contemporary reader would be amiss to ignore the article’stimeliness. Mauss did not take up the study of emotion in aboriginal


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funerary rituals as an end in itself, but viewed it as a fruitful comparativequestion to explore after the Great War had left continental Europewracked with loss and mourning. Nor was he alone in questioning the psy-cho-physiological grounds for collective sentiments. A handful of his mostprescient contemporaries also felt beholden to qualify these psychicuncertainties in the emerging post-war environment. Freud, Benjamin,and Lévi-Bruhl, each of whom were unsettled by the pull of 1920s nation-alistic seductions, would independently analyze how “irrational” sensoryexperience lent meaning to collective existence.5 In Mauss’s own scholar-ly context, the need to reconcile the Année sociologique’s unwaveringsocio-centrism with budding psychological, physiological, and linguisticresearch developments seemed undeniable.

“L’homme total” is the figure of speech that he adopted to generalizethese holistic representational concerns; the expression is perhaps bestunderstood as “the total human being,” informed by contrastive communi-cation and systems of agonistic reciprocal obligations. Although developedas a means of circumventing philosophical imbroglios, Mauss’s concept ofl’homme total would presage (if not singularly foment) the heterogeneousscholarly programs all-too-loosely categorized under the rubric of Frenchstructuralism. For Mauss, however, the empirical challenge of representingl’homme total was both philosophical and methodological: for, by allappearances, he wrote, “everything mingles here, [interweaving the] body,soul, and society…That is what I propose to call phenomena of totality, inwhich not only the group participates, but also, through it, all the person-alities, all the individuals in their moral, social, mental, and above all cor-poreal and material interests” (Fournier 2005:240). The study of l’hommetotal entailed an intellectual wager that sociologists could move beyondtheir dependence on “social facts,” or the Durkheimian “science of the con-crete,” by which collective representations, when acted upon, assumeempirical value and give license to the discipline of sociology. These preoc-cupations shifted comparative ethnology’s focus to the integral sense ofdebt and reciprocity that draws all people together, rendering permanentand complex interpersonal obligations to others more intelligible. Thenotion of totality in play is separate and distinct from the “totalistic” inter-pretations undermined by 1980s and 90s anthropological critiques. Hisanalyses of “total social facts” took great pains to identify and reject essen-tialist over-determinations guided by particular theoretical interests—how-ever well-situated and justified.

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Mauss’ oft-repeated obsessions with “the facts” exemplified his post-war concerns with representing the super-abundance of motivating fac-tors in any social phenomenon. In his view, l’homme total offered apanacea for the thought-restricting academic formalisms of his time:

Whether we study special facts or general facts, it is always the com-plete man that we are primarily dealing with…For example,rhythms and symbols bring into play not just the aesthetic or imag-inative faculties of man but his whole body and his whole soulsimultaneously. In society itself when we study a special fact it iswith the total psychophysiological complex that we are dealing. Wecan describe the state of an individual ‘under an obligation,’ i.e.,one morally bound, hallucinated by his obligations, e.g., by a pointof honour, only if we know the physiological and not just the psy-chological effect of the sense of that obligation. We cannot under-stand why man believes when he prays, for example, that prayer iseffective, unless we realize that when he speaks, he hears his ownwords and he believes, he exhales in all the fibres of his being(Mauss 1979:27; emphasis added)

For all intents and purposes, the total human being was a complicated,polymorphous, and unfinished creature. Whether discussing prayer or con-temporary European politics, l’homme total could be shown to assumemany and irrepressibly different internal and external embodiments. In“The obligatory expression of feelings,” Mauss analyzed the psycho-physio-logical experience of ritualised bodily techniques in the act of crying fordead loved ones. The goal of this new methodology was not to locate or cri-tique the origins of Reason—a project that Mauss embarked upon withDurkheim a quarter-century earlier in Primitive Classification.6 Instead,Mauss wanted a full reappraisal of the corporal and emotional significanceof collective existence.

The dangerous appeal of collectivism seemed all-too-apparent by theend of international hostilities. Even before the War, Mauss had located arepresentational problem at the heart of studying collective life; a paradoxthat betrayed both the power and limitations of the sociological enterprise:“there is no social phenomenon that is not an integral part of the socialwhole,” and yet “a whole in itself is only a relationship” (Mauss 1927:138-9; f. Fournier 2005:250). The wide net cast by this form of ethnological scep-


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ticism can be traced to a remarkably prescient conjecture. By the early1920s, Mauss had begun to embrace a contrastive understanding of agonis-tic and language-based social relations more commonly associated withlate-20th Century post-structuralism—concerned with adopting “ thenative’s preoccupations,” along with the “excess” value of “fetishized”objects and “irrational” processes, even if this kind of perspective meantbeing “fooled by the native.” This tendency in Mauss’s work was initiallypointed out, and first decried, by Claude Lévi-Strauss himself (1987[1950]).Did his personal experience(s) on the Western Front influence Mauss todetach comparative ethnology from its European philosophical bearingsand pretensions to absolute rational principles? One way or another, Maussbegan to argue that to isolate and/or grant philosophical privilege to anysingle human capacity—for example: the mind, the ego, the body, the self,personhood, existence, conciousness, etc.—was effectively to cordon offone’s subject of analysis from the myriad social contingencies that informand intrude upon all communicative practices. Indeed, his abiding method-ological concerns with l’homme total would quickly alienate and distancehim from his most provocative students’ intellectual agendas. WhenBataille, Leiris, Caillois, and other members the College de Sociologieschematized the ontological dimensions of modern European life (Hollier1988), Mauss by contrast advocated an increasingly self-critical approach tosociology: he began to cultivate an excessive empirical openness to doubt,suspicion, induction, etc., in reappraisals of the always-growing and contra-dictory bodies of ethnological literature.

In his private correspondence for example, Mauss heaped all theridicule he could manage upon Roger Caillois (his former student and afounding member of the College de Sociologie) who suggested that Frenchcitizens’ self-reflective “decadence” could be remedied by revitalizing therole of myth in French society. Caillois’ unconscionable mistake, as Maussdiagnosed it, was not that his theory provided intellectual fodder fornationalistic sentiments in a period of looming international hostilities;instead, Mauss characteristically objected to Caillos’ arbitrary delimita-tion of comparative analysis to but one society as an all-explanatoryrubric for interpretation:7 “What I believe is a general derailment—ofwhich you yourself are the victim—is the sort of absolute irrationalismwith which you conclude in the name of modern myth: the labyrinth ofParis.” (Fournier 2005:327). The great ethnologist was keenly suspiciousof any principle that closed the ranks of inquiry to one social collective,

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a critical stance that he developed and refined at least a decade beforeWWI unfolded.8 In the aftermath of international warfare, any type ofsociological closure seemed methodologically narrow-minded and con-ceptually impoverished on moral grounds.

And yet, an intellectual program of inveterate comparative and self-crit-ical examination was not a simple undertaking. Nor was it easy to conveythe type of multi-disciplinary inductivism he advocated, of which l’hommetotal and “systems of total services” were his most poignant methodologi-cal and empirical spurs.9 As the editor of L’Année sociologique in the 1920s,Mauss explained to potential contributors that “ the problems invogue…lead to imitation by everyone wanting to write the book of themoment” (Fournier 2005:252). He then advised that “[e]veryone’s goalshould be to create [analytic and empirical] strengths that can be directedtowards unknowns. It is the unknown that needs to be revealed” (ibid).Mauss’s resuscitation of the Année sociologique would not survive more thantwo editions due in no small measure to the weight of his impossible expec-tations. The problem he personally wished to resolve was indeed “the oblig-atory expression of feelings,” an empirical juggernaut that, combined withhis unparalleled capacity for ethnological speculation, would draw Maussalone into the rediscovery of potlatch as a trans-cultural system of obligato-ry and usurious religious and legal services—and the principle of giftexchange. We claim in this article that the research involved in the presentessay helped to prepare Mauss for the discoveries of the gift, concerned asit is with the problematic relation between obligation and inner volition.We therefore pause to consider the socio-political juncture—the eventuali-ty itself—out of which Mauss emerged from World War I only to conjoinsociological and psychological resources

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Mauss wrote “The Obligatory Expression of Feelings” to publicize andelaborate upon a private exchange of letters with George Dumas inresponse to the latter’s 1921 essay, “The Language of Laughter.” Mauss per-haps took more than a little umbrage at Dumas’s reference to “primitivepopulations” without specifically addressing Hertz and Durkheim, hisAnnée colleagues, on the shedding of tears in aboriginal funerary rituals.His essay responds to this perceived affront by showing how recent ethno-logical findings on the “greeting by tears” only revalidated their pre-warinvestigations. Importantly, his deceased collaborators’ materials recon-


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firmed the performative significance of crying in public rituals for deadmembers of the community. “One…does more than show one’s feelings[through tears], they are shown to others, because they must be shown tothem. They are shown to oneself through expressing them to others andfor the other’s account” (Mauss 1921; translated below). These collectiveexpressions of grief and mourning were not only obligatory from the per-spective of Australian societies; tears, which are normally viewed as theprerogative of the sovereign individual, were also coordinated with songsand shouts, in which “stereotypy, rhythm, unison, [and] all these [oralrites,] are at the same time physiological and sociological” (ibid; emphasisadded). In effect, as Mauss indicated “by the mere fact that they are let outtogether, these cries have a significance evidently different from that of apure interjection without import…They have their efficacy” (281). Any“language” of simultaneous emotional expressions depended upon thecollective recognition and synchronization of performed bodily experi-ence. In order to analyze the dynamic interplay between internal andexternal embodiments of “tears,” the comparative ethnologist wouldrequire the intellectual resources of psychology to assess how their symbol-ic form and content could be incorporated as well as publicly manifested.For Mauss, the resolution of this problem seemed more than French soci-ology could accomplish on its own.

According to Fournier, “when Durkheim had established his work plan,it had been possible to believe that sociology was seeking to reduce psy-chology to subsistence wages.” (2005:222) But Mauss was not an intellec-tual Oedipus in his endeavouring to locate conceptual bridges betweenpsychology and sociology. Nor did he seek to annex psychology’s materialand intellectual resources to Durkheimian sociology. In the half-decadefollowing his demobilization, he published “The obligatory expression offeelings” and a variety of speculative essays in French psychology journals,and even served as president of the Société de Psychologie from 1923 to1926 (Leacocks 1954:68). Whether his cross-disciplinary movementamounted to a sudden about-face is open to conjecture and debate. Mausshimself provides key insight into his vision of a common object of studythat would justify formal collaboration with psychologists in his 1923address to the Société. Mauss said there that both sociology and what heviewed as the most progressive wing of its sister discipline—exemplified bythe work of Georges Dumas—took as the object of study the “coordinationof three elements: the body, [the] individual consciousness, and the collec-

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tivity” (Mauss 1969: v. 3, pp. 280-1). His 1923 lecture speaks in terms of amethodology nearly identical to that of his Essai sur le don (1925) and tohis lecture on bodily techniques delivered nine years later (1934). Recentlypublished histories of French sociology describe Mauss’s awakening tol’homme total under the philosophical guise of “total social facts” x. Bycontrast, this introduction to “The obligatory expression of feelings”explores post-war ambiguities in French ethnology’s explanatory rubricsand how Mauss developed his concept of l’homme total in part to resolvethem. His multidisciplinary musings would find their most succinct expres-sion in the Essai sur le don, but l’homme total’s methodological programwas likewise developed across a number of works on the social and reli-gious nature of interpersonal obligations. Mauss’s experimentations withinter-war psychology should not be written off as marginalia, or viewedmerely as a reaching out beyond the narrow ranks of sociologists to gener-ate ideological allies for Durkheimian projects.

Most notably, “L’expression obligatoire des sentiments” elaborates across-disciplinary methodology in opposition to European philosophicalcurrents. The essay is both an immediate precursor to his studies on ago-nistic systems of reciprocal debt and obligation, and a speculativemethodological entrée into the study of total social phenomena: anexploration of crying as a fully integrative social and psycho-physiologicalresponse to bereavement. The essay radically undercuts the subject ofmoral philosophy. Our understanding of Mauss is potentially transformedby these minor details by which he arrived at the problem of the gift.Studying l’homme total would redefine the labors of sociology and psy-chology by spurning any reliance on the liberal philosophical subject.Mauss persuasively defined the complementary agenda of these youngbut maturing fields in terms of their shared oppositionality:

A discussion of the relation between our two sciences seems…imposing and philosophical, but it is certainly less important than thesmallest advance in fact or theory on any particular point…For it is nolonger a matter of philosophy. We do not have to defend either psy-chology or sociology. Thanks to forty years of effort, our sciences havebecome phenomenologies. We know that two special realms exist: therealm of consciousness on the one hand, and the realm of collectiveconsciousness and the collectivity on the other…. On these two basicpoints—the phenomenological and experimental character of our two


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sciences, the division between our sciences—we are all agreed. Theonly questions which separate us are questions of measurements andquestions of facts. (Mauss 1979:2-3)

Mauss clearly endeavoured to advance social inquiry under the aegis ofl’homme total. And yet, it would be mistaken to view his advocacy ofl’homme total as the endorsement of a purely “scientific mythologeme,”measured against the absolute principles that justify totalitarian or com-plete-consensual rule, which today’s human sciences nearly take for grant-ed. Instead, his labours across the 1920s sought to countenance the ambigu-ities of European inter-war scholarship when confronted with increasinglyabundant cross-cultural moral and political difference. The socioeconomictheory he soon developed famously argued for the productivity of “archaic”systems of exchange. But the methodological impetus behind the gift lay ina completely reformulated notion of the economic and socio-political sub-ject, psycho-physiologically “hallucinated,” i.e. not rationalized, “by [his orher] obligations” (Mauss 1979:27). Understood in this light, our introductionto Mauss’s essay draws attention to a seductive trap by which today’s anthro-pological scholarship—faithfully indebted to l’homme total and its all-encompassing philosophical implications—may actually forsake the abidingmethodological considerations that lent Mauss’s hermeneutics their cross-cultural intrigue across the humanities and social sciences.

At the same time, we are mindful of the limitations of attempts to spanthe history of the discipline and to place a set of Mauss’s observationsabout 1920s French ethnology in conversation with current anthropologi-cal projects. For one, comparative ethnology is a long-superannuated intel-lectual movement of anthropology’s early specialization rather than aresearch program to resuscitate and promote. The material and theoreti-cal interdependence of this mode of inquiry with Euro-American colonial-ism needs to be noted (cf. Asad 1973), along with critiques of representa-tion by post-colonial and feminist researchers in opposition toevolutionary and functionalist theoretical frameworks.11 But we alsodepart from the rising intellectual tide that would delegitimize compara-tive ethnological (and comparative ethnographic) questions as symptomsof Euro-American fantasy worlds. Across the inter-war period, Maussattempted but failed to complete a critical history of nationalism and ded-icated most of his work to critiques of evolutionary and diffusionist argu-ments for national race superiority. Although personally trained in

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Durkheimian sociology and the primacy of the conscience collective, hiswartime experience certainly gave him a more sceptical view of the nation-alistic uses and abuses of the authority of collective representations.12

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Regarding the translation itself, we have attempted in so far as possibleto preserve Mauss’s distinctive grammatical flourishes, making adjustmentsonly where the ultimate (disciplinary, historical, and personal) meaningsmight be obscured by formal slavishness. We possibly hew closer to theessay’s original French structure than a faithful translation should: the writ-ing in this text is not especially elegant, nor does it attempt to communicateitself at a poetic level. Yet we think that Mauss’s writing style—with its manyinterjections and long sentences, its habit of piling on qualifying adjectivesand strings of citations—is deeply characteristic of his ethnological scholar-ship and intrinsically reflects his way of thinking. The most difficult problemraised by this project is how to translate Mauss’s idea of “sentiment” in “l’ex-pression obligatoire des sentiments.” Initially drawn to its English cognate,we have since decided upon the more informal and emotive connotations ofthe French sentiments by translating it as “feeling.”13 The English “senti-ment” has an analytic tone of emotional distance and abstraction that wouldappear to undercut the radically integrative character of Mauss’s argument.Notions of the universal human subject are dealt a greater blow if feelingsin themselves are understood as socially and psycho-physiologically influ-enced facts, and never, in the final analysis, represented as the privilege ofautonomous and private opinion. “Feelings”—and their obligatory expres-sion—would seem more than sentiments to convey this critical point.

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“The Obligatory Expression of Feelings” no doubt reflects the intellectu-al strains and preoccupations of its day and age. Mauss and his fellow eth-nologists lived and worked during a period of unprecedented cross-cultur-al interpenetrations that unsettled European conceptions of politics,society, and civilization. In the Great War’s aftermath, the aporia of thesevery “ideals” turned moral and aesthetic foundations of right and/or ritualorder into questions of singular importance (eg. Stocking 1987, Fournier2005). Although Mauss makes a case for the socially conferred nature ofemotional life, his essay implicitly accepts the universality of French andIndo-European loan words (e.g. “sorrow,” “anger,” “fear,”), and of their fas-


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cinating “total” referents in comparatively marginalized non-Western soci-eties. If “one must be a good philologist to be a good sociologist,” as Maussconfided to an acquaintance early in his career (Fournier 2005:59), then wemay observe that by 1921 Mauss had not yet introduced the disruptive eth-nological language of difference implied by generalized analysis ofwords/practices such as mana, hau, and potlatch (for which no precise lexi-co-grammatical corollaries exist(ed) in Indo-European languages). This typeof epistemological provocation would have to wait another four years untilhis publication of the Essai sur le don (1925).

“The obligatory expression of feelings” deals more narrowly with theinterpersonal and psychic force of tears. Mauss’s argument turns on adescription of oral rites in Australian funerary practices, and how spokenejaculations to ward off “evil spirits” (koi) phenomenologically evoke themind, body, and soul’s synchronized “conjuration and expulsion of malfea-sance” (baubau). Despite undermining the idea of a universal human sub-ject, the task of describing the social influence of emotional life comesdangerously close to a predetermined interpretive procedure: one ofobserving and subsequently expecting which particular emotions areexhibited by categories of individuals in given social moments and perfor-mative contexts (as in the collectively staged and witnessed formality ofAustralian funerary rituals). To do so with circumspection, to remain atten-tive to the empirical person, however, was Mauss’s great challenge to soci-ologists and psychologists. In lectures and publications, Mauss would advo-cate the study of l’homme total’s unpredictable qualities from inveteratelyinductive rather than classically philosophical points of view.

After the “War to End All Wars,” in any event, Mauss did not observe theneed to uphold Durkheim’s combative stance against other disciplines onthe unchallengeable primacy of the social. How did the give-and-take ofsocial life ever lead to such a devastating international and sub-human frat-ricide? Once again, Mauss’s research program comes alive in the attempt toexplain subjective experience when threatened by death, warfare, and thenegation of one’s humanity. The Essai sur le don may have crystallized hispost-war concerns with non-rational economic systems. However, The Gift’smethodological raison d’etre was to locate the most deeply ensconced socialand psycho-physiological grounds of agonistic opposition to open warfare.Only l’homme total could have illuminated how the potential loss ofhumanity is paradoxically central to gift exchange as a moral system; theperson who fails to give—as well as the person who receives but cannot or

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will not respond with “counter-prestations” in kind, with all the understat-ed decorousness of good timing—loses not only one’s honor vis-à-vis theunreciprocated gift, but also forfeits one’s “total” status as a full and pro-ductive participant in collective life. Mauss’s sociology of the gift is radical-ly humanistic; but his major comparative study of “systems of total servic-es,” in which he outlined the achievement of personhood in gift exchange,always entails the underlying threat of dehumanization. In other words,Mauss’s theory of the gift was conditioned by his formulation of l’hommetotal and the ways in which open warfare always transgresses humanbeings’ interpersonal restraints on the “productivity” of conflict.

Insofar as Mauss’s oeuvre remains critically important for workinganthropologists, the key point of departure is to obliterate the philosoph-ical subject as a category of individual agency, conditionality, and tempo-rality.14 “Feelings” are drawn cross-culturally from the human repertoireonly to be experienced and displayed in socially choreographed ways.Speaking to his colleagues, Mauss would outline a complementary divi-sion of labor between psychology and sociology that encouraged trouble-some yet revitalizing forms of disicplinary miscegenation based upon hisnew methodological observations:

[S]ociology, just like human psychology, is a part of that part [sic] ofbiology called anthropology; i.e., the sum-total of the sciences thatconsider man as a living, conscious and sociable being.

Here, allow me, who, insofar as I transgress the narrow circles ofmy science, claim to be only a historian or anthropologist, and, fromtime to time, a psychologist, to say more precisely what is to be under-stood by this: that sociology is exclusively anthropological. Whereaspsychology restricts itself no more than physiology to the study ofman; whereas, for example, our colleagues [in the various fields ofpsychology]…chose the subjects of their experiments through therange of animals, we observe and record only human facts.

Note this point well. I know that here I am touching on the diffi-cult question of animal societies. The latter will, I hope, one dayattract the attention of young scientists who will no doubt make newadvances in the subject. But in the meantime it is necessary to pro-ceed with vigour and a certain arbitrariness in all these preliminarydelimitations. Human societies are, by nature, animal societies, andall of the traits of the latter are also found in them. But there are


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other traits which distinguish them to the point of their constitutinga new order…In the behaviour of the most highly formed groups ofanthropoid apes,…we do not, I claim, find general wills or the pres-sure of the consciousness of the ones on the consciousness of the oth-ers, communications of ideas, language, practical and aesthetic arts,groupings and religions—this is for me a primordial fact, an Evidenz,a cogito ergo sum—that make us not only social man, but even manas such. (Mauss 1979:5; translation by Ben Brewster)

As this passage would seem to indicate, Mauss considered himself profound-ly beguiled by human decision-making faculties and called upon academicdisciplines at large to dramatically widen the scope of humanistic discussion.Were these post-war inquiries informed by Western scholars’ intellectualbetrayals, justifying state-centric forms of logic that stripped nations andentire peoples of their common or shared humanity? One may never entire-ly know. After the First World War, however, Mauss quickly marshalled anysocial science methodology that could illuminate the complex human rela-tionships between obligation and inner volition to arrest an alarming direc-tion he observed in the human sciences. Henceforth, Mauss’ psycho-physio-logical turn became the most fruitful calling he could imagine: a study of thelife-threatening boundaries between the human and non-human. By socio-logically re-founding the psychological, Mauss sought to identify age-oldforms of moral judgment entirely distinct from the rarefied abstractions ofrational economic and political inquiries. Psychological research held notonly the keys to unlocking a more explanatory sociological discipline; it alsoseemed absolutely crucial to the elaboration of a truly comparative human-ism. As Mauss himself would argue, “Whatever the collectivity’s power ofsuggestion, it always leaves the individual a sanctuary, his consciousness,which belongs to you [: the psychologists].”15

* * * *

In his pursuit of l’homme total, Mauss’s disciplinary shadow continues tohaunt any number of anthropological projects that borrow from philosoph-ical currents as incontrovertible ethnographic standpoints. Notably, Mauss’s1921 essay casts a harsh perspective on Georgio Agamben’s widely heraldedaccount of religious sociology’s fascinations with totems and taboos(1998:75-80). Agamben’s thesis on comparative ethnology—that earlyanthropologists’ preoccupations with “the ambivalence of the sacred” in rit-

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ual prohibitions were simply the empirical projection of Occidental politicalsovereignty (i.e. the paradoxical capacity to “exclude by inclusion”) upon so-called “primitive populations”—has exercised a powerful influence onethnographers all-too-ready to discount ethnology as a justification ofanthropology’s early colonial applications.16 These claims about comparativeethnology should be interrogated in light of Mauss’s inter-war research proj-ects in addition to his turn-of-the-century collaborations.

Mauss’s displacement of French sociology in writings such as “Theobligatory expression of feelings” turns Agamben’s thesis on its head. Theessay clearly destabilizes sociological over-determinations (includingfunctional evolutionary models that allow for one-to-one allegorical com-parisons between societies); Mauss’s post-war reliance on l’homme totalto guide ethnological analysis rejected any unitary conception of tech-nique or technology that might be instrumentalized to justify a universalsocio-political order. His multidisciplinary inductivism might even be saidto dissolve sociological arguments for the sovereignty of the collective.Mauss’s 1920s research program openly resisted the prevalent continentalidea that individual and national social bodies were the only things thatmattered. Had not the European nations pragmatically decided, and indi-viduals like himself and the troops under his personal command, ulti-mately ratified the war by their own participation? For the post-warMauss, the triangulated psychic powers of social life, i.e. “ the body, theindividual consciousness, and the collectivity,” demanded that compara-tive ethnologists avoid the tempting instrumentalization of any one ofthese powers as an exclusive means to justify social ends—even in a cri-tique of these ends—and to always be mindful of the great and terrifyingtotal social facts of human temporal commitments.17 The messianicimpulse of European nationalism had destroyed most of his dearest socialrelationships. Contemporary life would never again be the same.

“The obligatory expression of feelings” should be read in hindsight as akind of eulogy for the pre-war battles Mauss fought to defend Durkheimiansociology from its many detractors. By the early 20s, Mauss had survived thetumult of mechanized warfare and personally observed its forms of solidar-ity and anomie up close—what Nathan Schlanger has provocatively calledhis “fieldwork of modernity”18 (2006:16). Writing to Durkheim from the bat-tlefront, he “often said that [the] war ought to provide new facts and newperspectives” (Fournier 2005:181). But Mauss might not have expected theperspectives gained from exposure to warfare to bear upon his own life. As


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he lectured to the Société de Psychologie in 1923, he noted that the “war hasmade us inexorably feel and live experiences” reminiscent of the societiesexplored by comparative ethnology (Mauss 1979:30). The same lectureextolled the “happy, secular, [and] civil” (ibid) ambitions of post-war Frenchsociety. And yet, Mauss did not hesitate to signal his weariness of the “vio-lent movements and absolute inhibitions which [such happy, secular, andcivil] expectation arouses in us” (ibid.) National publics from all corners ofEurope had justified the War to End All Wars as a rational and secular-humanistic defence of civilized ideals. But Europeans’ civil deliberationsprovided no sure means of avoiding l’homme total’s “vendetta ritual [in]and of the determination of responsibility,” (c.f. Mauss 1921; translatedbelow) i.e. of using the collective and moral force of one’s tears to psycho-logically excuse further belligerence.

The need to purge Euro-American cycles of violence had clearly failedto necessitate a revalorization of the conscience collective, or any processof “ individuation” through the organic specialization of divisions of labor(Durkheim 1893). Instead, Mauss’s post-war labours sought to identify thepsycho-physiological (and more ethnographically grounded) dimensionsof gift exchange in all their hierarchical and transformative complexi-ties.19 But Mauss’s theory of the gift was not fashioned overnight. First heneeded to reevaluate his methodological commitments in light of his warsurvivor’s experience.

In studying Australian societies’ funerary rituals, Mauss discovered yetanother “country of the dead” (Mauss 1921, translated below) highly differ-ent from that of his own post-war France: a foreign land where peoplecould shout, sing, and cry—fully engaging one’s mind, body, and soul—toremediate unresolved tensions between those who depart from a malevo-lently ensorcelled world and those who remain to survive them. Mauss’sessay describes the symbolic economy of these Australian funerary rituals,but he also needed to qualify “their efficacy” as “expressions of sentimentswhich are essentially, not exclusively psychological phenomena, or physio-logical, but social phenomena, eminently marked with the sign of non-spontaneity, and of the most perfect obligation” (ibid). These vague andearly formulations of l’homme total opened a new vantage point onto theinterplay of body, mind, and soul. L’homme total proved irreducible to thesovereignty of individual or collective life. By doubly serving as the psycho-physiological basis of productive human exchange, the study of feelings andtheir obligatory expression points to Mauss’s speculative movement toward

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a fully elaborated theory of the gift. The masculinist defense of Europeannationhood had obliterated or maimed entire generations of men through-out the continent. Nobody could forget the war. Yet warfare’s human tollwas neither easily interpreted nor uniformly assimilated. Reflecting uponWWI’s unprecedented loss-of-humanity and the failures of European mas-culinity, Mauss took up a comparative study of womens’ “greeting by tears”at least in part to reappraise the gift and sacrifice of 20th Century co-exis-tence. How must it have felt?

The bodies of his loved ones, mutilated in a fit of national pride anddestructiveness, floated in and out of his consciousness. Unresolved emo-tions welled up and flooded across his dispassionate scientific interests.Lives were at stake. And so were future deaths. Of course he would resumea course of ethnological study after the war subsided; but holding Spencerand Gillen in hand, and other Australian texts that Durkheim thought werekeys to unlocking the earliest sociological repertoires, also drew him to thememories of his loved ones and to the world-of-ideas they had co-founded.It seemed he could only explore and regain this lost world through nostal-gia. For the future comparative ethnologist of exchange and reciprocity,however, it was precisely upon reaching this foreclosed and backwards-looking conclusion that he could no longer recognize himself in his wordsor ideas. Was this not precisely the same impulse, to finalize the meaningsof social relationships, and to determine, once and for all, one’s future, irre-spective of the interests of others, that had fed so well into the collectiveparoxysm of a “War to End All Wars?” He realized that tears for the depart-ed were obligatory yet always self-deceptively choreographed. Inside hisgut, he could sense the repulsive symmetry between the victim and subjectof this unspeakable sacrifice, and immediately perceived the loomingthreat of his feelings to his own scholarly interests. This was not a momentto dwell upon his body—or even to reflect upon the bodies of others. Itwas, on the other hand, a uniquely appropriate moment to write againstwhat the time of dying had forcibly made of them. Or so we imagine.

The Obligatory Expression of Feelings (Australian oral funerary rituals)20

Marcel Mauss (1921)

This communication is tied to the work of M. G. Dumas on Tears,21 and to thenote I sent him on that subject. I mentioned to him the extreme generalityof this obligatory and moral use of tears. They serve in particular as a means


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of greeting. Indeed, this practice is found to be quite widespread amongstwhat we agree to call the primitive populations, above all in Australia and inPolynesia; it has been studied in North and South America by M. Friederici,who has suggested naming it Tränengruss, the greeting by tears.22

It is my intention to show through the study of oral ritual in theAustralian funerary cults that, in a considerable group of populations, suf-ficiently homogenous and sufficiently primitive in the literal sense of theterm, the guidelines that M. Dumas and I have provided for tears mightapply to numerous other expressions of feelings. It is not only crying, butall kinds of oral expressions of sentiments which are essentially, not exclu-sively psychological phenomena, or physiological, but social phenomena,eminently marked with the sign of non-spontaneity, and of the most per-fect obligation. We shall remain focused if you will in the field of oralfunerary ritual that covers shouts, speeches, and songs. But we couldbroaden our investigation to all sorts of other rites, manual in particular,in the same funerary cults and amongst the same Australians. Severalexamples, in conclusion, suffice to follow the question into a largerdomain. It has already been studied by our much missed Robert Hertz23

and Émile Durkheim24 on the subject of the same funerary cults that theone attempted to explain, and of which the other made use to demon-strate the collective character of piacular ritual. Durkheim even posed, inopposition to M. F. –B. Jevons,25 the rule that mourning is not the sponta-neous expression of individual emotions. We shall resume this demonstra-tion with a few details on the subject of oral rites.

* * * *

Oral funerary rites in Australia are composed: (1) of cries and howls,often melodic and rhythmic; (2) of voceros often sung; (3) of actualspiritism séances; and (4) of conversations with the dead.

Let us disregard for an instant the last two categories. This neglect isharmless. These beginnings of the cult of the dead itself are highlyevolved and general facts. Furthermore, their collective character isextraordinarily marked; these are public ceremonies, well regulated, partof the vendetta ritual and of the determination of responsibility.26 Thus,amongst the tribes of the Tully River,27 this entire ritual takes place dur-ing sung funerary dances of lengthy unfolding. The dead person is pres-ent, in person, by his or her shriveled corpse which is the object of a kindof primitive necropsy. And it is a considerable audience, the whole camp,

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or even the whole tribe that is assembled that sings indefinitely to givethe dances their rhythm:

Yakai! ngga wingir,Winge ngenu na chaimban,Kunapanditi warre marigo.

Translation: “ I wonder where he [the koi, the evil spirit] met you, weare going to extract your viscera and see.” Specifically, it is following thistune and in a dancing rhythm that four magicians guide an old man torecognize—and to extract from the corpse—the enchanted object thatcaused the death. These rituals, repeated indefinitely until a divinationhas been achieved, conclude with another series of dances, including oneby the widow who, taking a step to the right and one to the left, and wav-ing branches, chases away the Koi from her husband’s corpse.28 In themeantime the rest of the audience assures the dead man that vengeancewill be exercised. This is only an example. To conclude with theseextremely developed rites, it is sufficient to demonstrate that they resultin extremely interesting practices for the sociologist as well as for the psy-chologist. In a great number of Australian tribes of the center, south,north, and northeast, the dead man does not content himself with givingan illusory response to the tribal conclave that interrogates him: it isphysically, really, in which the collectivity that evokes him hears himrespond;29 it is a genuine experience we willingly call in our teaching thecollective pendulum: the corpse that is carried on the shoulders of theseers or future blood avengers responds to their questions, leading themin the direction of the murderer.30 One sees quite clearly from these exam-ples, that these complicated and evolved oral rites show feelings and col-lective ideas in play, and even have the great benefit of letting us compre-hend the group, the collectivity in action, or interaction if you like.

* * * *

The simpler rites which we shall develop a bit more, including shoutsand songs, do not have as much of a public and social character; howev-er they utterly lack any character of the individual expression of feelingexperienced in a purely individual way. The matter of their spontaneityhas been resolved for a long time for the observers; to such an extent thatamongst them it has almost become an ethnographic cliché.31 They can-


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not stop recounting stories about the way in which, in the middle of triv-ial occupations, of banal conversations, all of a sudden, at fixed hours,dates, or occasions, the group, above all the women, begin to howl, to cry,to sing, to shout invectives at the enemy and the devil, to conjure up thesoul of the dead; and then after this explosion of sorrow and anger, thecamp, except perhaps a few persons specifically designated for mourning,re-enters the humdrum of day-to-day life.

In the first place such cries and songs are uttered by the group. It isgenerally not individuals who let them out individually, but the camp.The number of quotable facts is innumerable. Let us take one example, abit exaggerated by its very regularity. The “cry for the dead” is a very com-mon custom in southern East Queensland. It lasts as long as the intervalbetween the first and second burial. It is assigned specific hours andtimes. For approximately ten minutes at sunrise and sunset each campwith a dead person to cry howled, cried, and lamented.32 When the campsassembled, there was even a true competition of shouts and tearsamongst these tribes, which could expand to sizeable congregations dur-ing the time of market fairs, the gathering of nuts (bunya), or initiations.

Yet not only are the times and conditions of the collective expressionof feelings fixed, so too are the agents of that expression. The latter donot howl and shout solely in order to translate their fear, anger, or sor-row, but because they are appointed and obliged to do so. First, it is cat-egorically not the de facto kin, so intimate as we conceive them—fatherand son for example—rather, it is legal kin who control the show ofmourning. If kinship is by uterine descent, father and son do not partici-pate considerably in the mourning of one another. We even have a curi-ous proof: amongst the Warramunga, a central tribe of primarily mascu-line decent, the uterine family reconstitutes itself especially for thefunerary ritual.33 Another notable case is that it is quite often cognates,the simple allies who are obliged, even during occasions of the simpleexchange of delegates or inheritance, to show the most sorrow.34

What finally demonstrates the purely obligatory nature of the expressionof sorrow, anger, and fear, is the fact that it is not shared amongst all rela-tives. Not only do predetermined individuals cry, howl, and sing, but theresponsibility to do so belongs, in law and in fact, to a single sex. Asopposed to the religious cults stricto sensu reserved in Australia for males,the funerary cults are almost entirely assigned to women.35 The authors areunanimous on this point and the fact is well-testified for all of Australia. It

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is pointless to cite innumerable references for a fact that is described andattested perfectly well.36 But even among the women, it is not only thosewho maintain de facto relations (daughters, sisters in masculine descent,etc.), but women determined by certain legal relations who play this roleliterally.37 We know it is ordinarily the mothers38 (do not forget that we arehere in a country of kinship by group), the sisters,39 and above all the widowof the deceased.40 Most of the time these cries, screams and songs accom-pany often very cruel mortifications that the women, one of them, or sev-eral amongst them, inflict upon themselves, and which we know are inflict-ed precisely to maintain the grief and the cries.41

Not only is it the women and specific women that shout and sing in thisway, there is also a certain quantity of cries of which they must acquitthemselves. Taplin tells us there was a “conventional quantity of cries andshouts” among the Narrinyerri.41 Let us note that this conventionality andregularity do not in the least preclude sincerity. No more than our ownfunerary customs. All this is at the same time social, obligatory, and yetviolent and natural; the pursuit and the expression of grief go together.We shall soon see why.

But first another proof of the social nature of these cries and feelingscan be extracted from the study of their nature and content.

In the first place, as inarticulate as they may be, these cries andshouts are always to a certain degree musical and most often sung witha rhythm and in unison by the women.42 Stereotypy, rhythm, unison, allthese are at the same time physiological and sociological. This canremain quite primitive, a melodic howl, modulated and with rhythm.43

It is therefore, at least in the center, east and west of Australia, a longejaculation, aesthetic and consecrated, and accordingly social in at leastthese two characteristics. These coordinated activities can evolve evenfurther: the rhythmic cries can become refrains,44 interjections of theAeschylean genre, cutting in and giving rhythm to even more elaboratesongs. At other times they form alternate choirs, including the men withthe women.45 But even when they are not sung, by the mere fact thatthey are let out together, these cries have a significance evidently differ-ent from that of a simple exclamation. They have their efficacy. Thus wenow know that the cry of baubau, uttered over two low notes, which thefemale criers of the Arunta and the Loritja let out, have a value ofαποτροπαιον, of conjuration, one might translate inexactly, of theexpulsion of maleficence more precisely.46


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Lastly, the songs; they are of the same nature. Needless to add that theyare set to rhythm, sung—they would not be what they are if they were not–, and as a consequence strongly molded in a collective form. As is their con-tent. The Australians, or rather the female Australians have their “voceratri-ces,” criers, and imprécantes, singing the mourning and death, swearing andcursing and casting a spell at the evil cause of death, always magical. Wehave numerous texts of these songs. Some are highly primitive, barelyexceeding exclamation, assertion, interrogation: “Where is my nephew, theonly one I have?”47 This one is rather widespread. “Why did you abandon methere?”—then the woman adds: “My husband [or my son] is dead!”48 Twothemes can be observed here: a sort of interrogation, and a simple assertion.The literature scarcely exceeds these two limits,49 the call out to and of thedead man, on one side, and the story concerning the dead man on the other.Even the longest and most beautiful voceros for which we have a text arereduced to this conversation and this sort of infantile epic.50 Nothing elegiacand lyric; barely a touch of feeling, once in a description of the country ofthe dead. However there are in general, simple filthy insults, vulgar curseagainst magicians,51 or means to reject the group’s responsibility.52 All in all,feeling is not excluded, but the description of facts and the ritual juridicalthemes prevail, even in the most developed songs.

* * * *

Two words to conclude, from a psychological point of view, or if youlike, of inter-psychology.

As we have just demonstrated: a considerable category of oral expressionsof sentiments, feelings, and emotions are nothing if not collective phenom-ena, in a very great number of populations, and spread all over the conti-nent. Let us mention straightaway that this collective character does not inthe least diminish the intensity of feelings, on the contrary. We may recallthe heaps that the Warramunga, Kaitish, and Arunta53 gather upon the dead.

But all these expressions of the individual and group feelings, collective,simultaneous, compulsory, with moral value, are more than simple manifes-tations, they are signs of understood expressions, in other words, a lan-guage.54 These shouts are like sentences and words. They must be said, butif they must be said it is because the whole group understands them.

One therefore does more than show one’s feelings, they are shown toothers, because they must be shown to them. They are shown to oneselfthrough expressing them to others and for the others’ account.

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It is essentially a symbolic.

* * * *

Here we encounter the very fine and curious theories that M. Head, M.Mourgue, and the most well-informed psychologists have proposed aboutthe naturally symbolic functions of the mind.

And we have a field, facts, upon which psychologists, physiologists, andsociologists can and must rally.

ENDNOTES1We acknowledge Leo Coleman and Ian Whitmarsh for generous commentary on prelimi-nary drafts; Bob Desjarlais and Mary Porter for unstinting guidance and support; JamesBoon for his longstanding heterodox readings of early comparative ethnology; and espe-cially Marcel Fournier, whose departmental lectures raised new questions about MarcelMauss’s political engagement for graduate students and faculty at Princeton. We are alsograteful to Virginia Fumagalli and to AQ’s anonymous reviewers for comments on theFrench-to-English translation.2“Les origines de la notion de monnaie,” Mauss’s last pre-war essay to be published,appeared in 1914. A bibliography of Mauss’s academic writings, with the exception ofbook reviews, can be found in Seth Leacocks ‘The Ethnological Theory of Marcel Mauss,’American Anthropologist 1954.3Fournier’s description of the First World War’s effect on Mauss remains the most compre-hensive biographical analysis (2005:174-184).4Take for example Mauss’s provocative essay on “techniques of the body” [1934]: a majoryet underappreciated part of the work’s appeal lay in its comedic tone, parodying theoverwrought conceptual formalism of 1930s French sociology. The significance of Mauss’sjokes about his outmoded swimming techniques that he could not, despite his best inten-tions, modify in practice, was not lost on his younger French students. With the lightesttouch, Mauss could demonstrate the imperative to open up comparative ethnology to amore comprehensive set of ethnographic data streams; the ethnographer, in his view,should catalogue how bodily posture and corporally-mediated knowledge serve as pri-mary vehicles for technological education and social reproduction. Incidentally, Mauss’sturn to the study of technique and technology took place after he assumed the presiden-cy of the Institute of Ethnology, an office through which he partly subsidized and promot-ed the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission to widespread critical acclaim.5See, for example, Lucien Lévi-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality (1978[1923]), Sigmund Freud’sBeyond the Pleasure Principle (2001[1920]), and Walter Benjamin’s “Outline of thePsychophysical Problem” (1996[1922-3])6We are indebted to Schlanger (2006:19) for this point.7Georges Bataille, Caillois’ philosophical interlocutor, good friend, and co-founder of theCollege de Sociologie, was similarly wont to assert a universal (and masculinist) panacea forcontemporary French society: he would strongly advocate a return to “virility,” theabsence of which he “dreaded as a calamity” (Bataille 1988:13; and passim).


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8Along with Henri Hubert, for example, Mauss wrote an extended, veiled criticism of thesociological insistence that magic and religion lie on separate continuums: i.e. the notionthat the ‘left sacred’ of magic (a society of belief unto itself) is antithetical to the ration-al, moral, and congregational sociality of the ‘Church sacred’—identifiable with collectivelife. Instead, Mauss and Hubert’s Essay on Magic showed that transgression of the law isfar from being inimical to its upholding; rather, the vast majority of ‘archaic’ societiesfound magical practices impossible to dissociate from religion at the level of concepts,practices, and emotions ( ‘sentiments’) (Mauss 2001). Even within a single society, collectivelife was never to be analyzed as a unitary or sovereign phenomenon.9Henri Hubert, perhaps Mauss’s closest intellectual collaborator, would note in a letter tohis friend, “I don’t yet understand very well the expression total services…There’s a longstream of words in discussing the facts that cannot take the place of formal generalizationor more precise definitions…It is often rather vague.” (Fournier 2005: 244)10See in particular the two works of Bruno Karsenti Marcel Mauss: Le fait social total (1994)and L’Homme total: Sociologie, anthropologie et philospohie chez Marcel Mauss (1997). Bothstudies advance positions on sociology’s relation to continental philosophy already stakedout by Georges Gurvitch (1950), writing in another post-war era.11Indeed, the similarities between Mauss’s work and feminist/postcolonial research proj-ects abound. Mauss’s sociological interests were markedly non-evolutionary for the peri-od in which he was writing, and “functionalist” only to the extent that “practices” exer-cise serial and reproducible effects. These latter phenomena were among the social factsthat most concerned him.12In keeping with Mauss’s sometimes contradictory practices, however, the great compar-ative ethnologist emerged from WWI as one of French socialism’s elder statesmen, andcontinued to defend the Parisian cooperative movement across the 1920s and 30s. As hewrote “The obligatory expression of feelings,” for instance, he was also drafting propagan-distic materials about the “tremendous development” of cooperatives in Russia (cf.Fournier 2005:204-14). This ambivalence in praxis does not undermine the legacy of hismultidisciplinary turn, and his increasingly sceptical attitude toward the interpersonalentanglements of collective consciousness.13Jane Marie Todd, who translated Marcel Fournier’s biography Marcel Mauss, chose torender the title “The Compulsory Expression of Feelings.” (Fournier 2005:219). We preferthe term “obligatory” over “compulsory” and its connotation of instinct-as-judgment,which seems more in keeping with Mauss’s speculative essay and its inter-disciplinaryargument.14Mauss’s essay highlights the influence of l’homme total on taken-for-granted notions ofpractice and discourse, and may speak to now-classic anthropological interests in a vari-ety of ways. For example, Mauss’s ethnological argument can be compared with ethno-graphic research on emotional subjectivityxv. Renato Rosaldo unforgettably describes theaccidental death of his wife, the anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and how thisunspeakable loss and its accompanying forms of mourning allowed him to comprehendIllongot peoples’ justifications of head-hunting as a form of subjective amelioration andself-recovery in personal loss (1980). Rosaldo investigated how one’s personal experiencewith death may situate and constrain one’s ability to comprehend “emotional phenome-na,” perfectly demonstrating the self-critical methodological inductivism in Mauss’sappeal to l’homme total. Catherine Lutz’s Unnatural Emotions has persuasively argued“that emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural,” and that subjec-tivity “can be viewed as a cultural and interpersonal process of naming, justifying, andpersuading people in relationship to each other” (1988:5). Lutz’s work has emblematizedthe problems that led Mauss to develop a methodological approach to the integrative yetsocially-conferred mind, body, and soul.

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15Mauss, 1924, “The Place of Sociology in Anthropology,” quoted in Fournier, MarcelMarcel Mauss: A Biography p 223. For a longer version of this passage, see Ben Brewster’stranslation in Mauss (1979:10).16For example, its unqualified rhetorical appeal to the “secularisation thesis” which sepa-rates Euro-American societies from other peoples for whom religion and tradition are dis-cursively “synonymous” (cf. Asad 2003; but see also Weber 1992); the near-entire elisionof the historical influence of Christendom on notions of European sovereignty in favour ofa genealogy that bridges Greco-Roman law and politics directly to the 18th century revolu-tionary-constitutional period; and much else.17Schlanger’s pathbreaking essay on Mauss’s studies of technique and technology (2006),takes great pains to elaborate upon the latter’s conception of “bodily techniques.” Thetechniques of the body are held out as a providential methodology for secular humanistsmore concerned with holistic than evolutionary theoretical models, citing Mauss’s com-ment on the subject: ‘it is undoubtedly technique that will save humanity from the moraland material crisis in which it is struggling’ (2006:23). And yet, we must also point out thatMauss’s concerns with ‘bodily techniques,’ as an expression of l’homme total, reflected hiscomplicit interpersonal experience as an ex-combatant within the raison d’etre ofEuropean warfare.18“In chronological, conceptual, and existential terms, Mauss’s unprecedented interest intechniques and their study effectively emerged from his involvement in what may be con-veniently called the fieldwork of modernity—that is, the life-shattering experiences of theGreat War and the intense ‘intellectual organisation of political passions’ that ensued (asJulien Benda put it in La Trahison des clercs (1927:40)” (Schlanger 2006:16).19Take, for instance, Mauss’s argument in The Gift: “Society is seeking to rediscover a cel-lular structure for itself. It is indeed wanting to look after the individual. Yet the mentalstate in which it does so is one in which are curiously intermingled a perception of therights of the individual and other, purer sentiments: charity, social service, and solidarity.The themes of the gift, of the freedom and obligation inherent in the gift, of generosityand self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominantmotif too long forgotten” (Mauss 1990[1925]:68).20Translation by Alexander Jones21Journal de psychologie, 1920; cf. “Le rire” Journal de psychologie, 1921, p. 47. “Le langagedu rire”22Der Tränengruss der Indianer. Leipzig, 1907. Cf. Durkheim in Année sociologique, 11, p. 46923“Représentation collective de la mort.” Année sociologique, X, p. 18 sq.24Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 567 sq.25Introduction to the History of Religion, p, 46 sp.—Sir J. G. Frazer, The Belief in Immortalityand the Worship of the Dead, 1913, p. 147, sees that these rites are regulated by custom,but gives them an explanation that is purely animist and basically intellectualist.26Cf. Fauconnet, La responsabilité, 1920, p. 236 sq.27W. Roth, Bulletin (Queensland Ethnography) 9, p. 390, 391. Cf. “Superstition, Magic, andMedicine.” Bulletin 3, p. 26, n° 99, sqq.28On the Koi, see Roth. Ult. Loc., p. 17, n° 65, p. 27, n° 150, etc.; the word Koi refers to aspirit, the ensemble of evil spirits, including human magicians and demons. Cf. ib., p. 33,n° 161, a Koi, Koi, the Koi.29Ex. A very good description of one of these séances in western Victoria. Dawson.Aborigines of South Austr., p. 663; Yuin (New South-East Wales). Howitt. South EasternTribes, 422, to cite only old facts long testified.


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30Examples of this ritual are found since Capt. Bedford (N. Queensland) among theKokoyimidir (V. Roth. Bulletin 9, p. 378, p. 383, p. 185, “being dragged by the corpse’s spir-it.” Cf. Grammar of the Kokoyimidir Language, p. 33 the story of a “woman who does notbelieve in what she records” down to Southern Australia Wyatt “Encounter Bay Tribes,” inWoods, Tribes of Southern Australia, p. 164-65, cf. p. 178 s. v. wunna wunna; passing bythe Center: Gason “Dieyeries,” in Curr. Australian Race, II, p. 62, etc. It is equally testifiedin New South Wales: Fraser. Aborigines, p. 83: Bonne; Customs, etc. R. Darling Journal ofthe Anthropological Institute, 1882, p. 134; and even on the coast (Fort Stephens): W. Scottin Howitt. South Eastern Tribes, p. 465.31Thus Taplin, Narrinyerri, p. 21 is almost literally repeated by Roth. Bulletin 9, 462, bySpencer and Gillen. Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 540, and by Eylmann.Eingeborenen, pp. 114, 233.32Roth. Bull. 9, p. 15. Tom Petrie. Reminiscences (the tribe of Brisbane), p. 59; cf. Roth.Bulletin, p. 400.33Spencer and Gillen. Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 520. Cf. the equivalent amongthe Diei, Howitt, South Eastern Tribes, p. 446.34Brothers-in-law howl when they receive the goods of the deceased (Warramunga),Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 522. Cf. Spencer, Tribes of Northern Territory, p.147, for a remarkable case of ritual and economic intertribal presentations on the occa-sion of deaths among the Kakadu of Northern Australia. The sorrow manifested hasbecome a purely economic and juridical affair.35It is not helpful to explain here why the women are in this way the essential agents offunerary ritual. These questions are of an exclusively sociological order, probably thisdivision of religious labor is due to multiple factors. However, for the clarity of ouraccount , and to make the incredible importance of these sentiments of a social originunderstood, let us indicate several of them: 1° woman is a being minoris resistentiae,and is charged and charges herself with tiresome rites , like the stranger (cf. Durkheim,Formes élémentaires, p. 572); she is, moreover, normally herself a stranger, she ischarged with the vexations that previously the group inflicted upon all its members (seethe collective rites of agony, Warramunga, R. Hertz “Représentation coll. …,” p. 184: cf.Strehlow. Aranda Stämme, etc., IV, II, p. 18, p. 25, where it is already only the womenwho pile themselves upon the dead; 2° woman is a being especially connected to malig-nant powers; her menstrual blood, her magic, and her faults render her dangerous. Sheis to some degree held responsible for the death of her husband. The text of a curiousstory of Australian women is found in Roth, Structure of the Kokoyimidir Language (CapBedford), Bulletin 3, p. 24, cf. Bulletin 9, p. 341, inaccurate translation p. 374. Cf.Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, p. 504. 3° in the greater part of the tribes, it is pre-cisely interdicted for a man, for a warrior to cry under any pretext, in particular fromgrief, and above all in the case of ritual tortures.36These are several of the oldest attestations. For southern Australian and Victoria, B.Smyth. Aborigines of Victoria, II, 297, I, 101, 104. West of New Wales: Bonney, “Tribes ofN. S. Wales,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, III, p. 126; Narrinyerri: Taplin,Narrinyerri Tribe, p. 20, cf. fig., p. 75. Eylmann, Eingeborenen, p. 240. East of New Wale forS. Kamilaroi. Curr. Austr. Race, II, 318, III, p. 29. Tribe of Signey: Collins. Journal, etc., II,17; Fraser. Aborigines of N. S. W., p. 53.37The lists of these women are only given in full by the most recent and the best ethnog-raphers” see Spencer and Gillen. Native Tribes, p. 506, 507, Northern Tribes, p. 520, Tribesof Northern Territory p. 255. (Mothers, women of a determined matrimonial class.)Strehlow. Aranda Stämme. IV, II, cf. p. 25 (Loritja).38This emerges from the preceding note.

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39Ex. Grey. Journals of Discovery, II, p. 316, the old women sing “our little brother,” etc. (W.Austr.).40The widow sings and cries for months among the Tharumba. Matthews, “EthnologicalNotes,” J. Pr. Roy. Soc. N. S. W., 1900, p. 274; the same among the Euahlayi, Mrs L. Parker,Euahlayi Tribe, p. 93, among the Bunuroug of the Yurra, the famous tribe of Melbourne,a “dirge” was sung by the woman during the ten days of mourning, Brough Smyth,Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 106.41Ex. Tribe of Glenormiton. Roth Bulletin 9, p. 394; Scott Nind “Natives of King GeorgeSound,” Journal of the Roy, Georg. Soc., I, p. 46, one of the oldest observers of theAustralian West literally says that they scrape and scratch the nose in order to cry.42Narrinyerri Tribe, p. 21. Roth. Ult. Loc.; Eylmann, Eingeborenen, p. 114 and 233, says,translating perhaps his predecessors, “pflichtgemässes Bejammern.”43Grey, Journal, II, p. 331, says of the tribes of the Vasse River: “shrill wailing, of thefemales…dirge…even musical, chauntes really beautiful.”44Ex. Brough Smyth, loc. cit., I, p. 101, Mrs Langloh Parker gives a rather good musicaldescription, loc. cit., p. 83.45Ex. Greville Teulon (Barkinji) in Curr. Australian Race, II, p. 204. “One can hear nothingmore plaintive and more musical.” Mathew (Kobi) in Curr., III, p. 165, the refrain is herea cry, (“plus”—this can mean either “no longer” or “more”) a very musical phrase: mybrother (father) “is dead.”46Fraser, loc. cit. up higher (“plus haut”).47Spencer and Gillen, N. T., p. 506, cf. 506, cf. 504, cf. p. 226-227, where it is misspelled:the meaning is clarified by Strehlow, IV, II, p. 28. We have among the Kakadu of the Golfof Carpentarie, a précis rite of oral conjuration of the soul of the dead Spencer. NorthernTerritory, p. 241, cf. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 67, 68: Animanque sepulchro condimus et magnasupremum voce ciemus48Lumholtz, Among the Cannibals, p. 264.49Howitt. South Eastern Tribes, p. 159.50Ex. Roth. Bulletin 9, p. 385, cf. Bull. 5, p. 15 sq.51See Grey, loc. cit., II, p. 316, 317, one of the longest examples of Australian poetry. L.Parker, loc. cit., p. 87-88, cf. p. 72, with description of the country the “women cannotmake fire.”52Roth. Bull. 3, p. 26, sung by the whole tribe.53Among the Mallanpara. Bull. 3, p. 26, n° 26.54V. an excellent new description, Strehlow, IV, II, p. 24.55Cf. Dumas, Le rire, p. 47.

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